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Saturday, June 12, 2021

CAPTAIN BOYCOTT (1947)

Like fellow filmmaking Brits, The Archers and the Boulting Brothers, Sidney Gilliat & Frank Launer were a prolific mid-last-century writer/producer/director team, but they regularly worked & took credit separately.  Of the two, Launder seems the more visually oriented, never more so then in this film and its predecessor, I SEE A DARK STRANGER/’46.* Cleverly worked out historical fiction, BOYCOTT spins romance & adventure around the birth of non-violent resistence in 1880s Ireland against Cecil Parker’s eponymous Captain*, charging exorbitant rents on his vast acreage to take over family farms.  Stewart Granger, not long before going Hollywood, is leading an armed revolt, wooing farm-usurping country gal Kathleen Ryan, and working a lousy Irish accent when he hears Irish politician Charles Parnell (Robert Donat with remarkable billing for a five minute speech) and is inspired to change tactics, pressuring Captain Boycott into submission thru shunning rather than shooting.  But not everyone in the community is convinced to put down their guns and simply turn their backs after British troops are sent in to ‘protect’ land, property, even ownership rights at the big horse race.  A tense third act sees all parties overplay their hand to fine dramatic effect as focus shifts slightly away from Granger to politically active local priest Alastair Sim, an actor who can pull focus even without help from a script.  Interesting stuff, especially on the historical side, neatly handled.

 DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *As mentioned, I SEE A DARK STRANGER. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/04/i-see-dark-stranger-1946.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Rather like a Molotov Cocktail, not invented by Soviet Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, but designed to be thrown at him, so ‘boycott’ wasn’t a political tactic invented by Captain Boycott, but was given his name after being used against him.

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